Monday, September 5, 2011

Genealogy and a Priest in the Mississippi Delta

This morning when I signed in to this blog, I found a comment about a post I had written some time ago on my other blog, Cemeteries of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The post was about the discovery of "The Lady in Red" near Egypt Plantation in the Mississippi Delta. The comment was written by Father Lincoln, who serves two Catholic parishes in Yazoo City, St. Mary and St. Francis of Assisi, along with the parish of All Saints in Belzoni, Mississippi. For those readers outside of Mississippi, the "Delta" region has a number of beautiful, old Catholic churches that were established by the many European immigrants who settled in that area during the 1800s. In addition to his work in these three Mississippi Delta parishes, Father Lincoln serves as a priest in two prisons located in Yazoo City, a federal prison complex and the Yazoo County Regional Correctional Facility. Although Father Lincoln must be a very busy man indeed, visiting parishioners in hospitals as far away as Jackson, he still finds time to write a blog entitled "A Priest in the Mississippi Delta." Not only does he include the text of his homilies in these blog posts, Father Lincoln also writes posts about parish members who have died. Now any experienced family history researcher knows that Catholic parish records have always been a vital resource in finding original baptismal, marriage, and death records. But Father Lincoln's blog posts about the lives of those who for whom he has said funeral masses contain much more. He memorializes their lives, their works, and their good deeds in words, details that parish documents do not contain.